So as it were, here goes nothing. Lately I’ve been looking for ways to help make my writing stronger + better all around. Since I’m not very experienced in this realm of my creative life, not traditionally at least, I’m taking it upon myself to figure out what that means.
I’ve tried music, time-blocking, learning when to walk away and clear my head and when to simply force myself to sit and write, no matter what comes out just to practice on getting better. Maybe it’s the DareDevil I watched this past weekend but I decided to close my eyes and just write. See, there’s no purpose to this article, just me writing about whatever comes to mind, not watching the word count to make sure I get paid enough to justify the time and effort put out, or seeing how the flow and cadence work in the overall structure of the piece. I will only correct the obvious punctuation at the end and nothing else, because if not, n0 wuld evar reasd htis shitty piece, I oknow thaatmcuh for suer.
It’s weird for me to say this, as I’ve only been getting paid to write for a year, so I’m not nearly as seasoned as some of my counterparts and friends, but I’m trying nonetheless maybe in an effort to make sure I always approach my work like this, but let’s be real here: today for writers, there’s a very different story-line to making a career off your writing. Gone are the days of getting paid two dollars a word or having the appropriate amount of time necessary to craft something truly worthy of lasting impact, it’s more about views based scales and getting a huge archive of content for cheap to maximize your company’s every-dwindling budgets.
Saying this is not to mock the current trends in writing, especially since they’re pretty much all I’ve known, but in an effort to understand what exactly changed over the years. I sometimes wonder if there was a change in how people approached writing or maybe it was the technology that made it more accessible just like the advent of digital did to the photography world.
I bet no one really knows — instead they simply acknowledge that things change. Adapt or die type mentality.
Surely I’m not the first or last to ask these questions, but instead only attempting to seek understanding through asking the questions that I struggle to answer. In the end that’s all we really can do in life anyways, ask questions to which we all seek answers to:
I read a piece by Jon Westenberg tonight that argued all of us tend to over complicate things out of fear of going the simpler route. I’m butchering it of course but that’s why I didn’t write the piece or have the veracious following that Jon has.
Yet, after reading that it made me think how much, as a people, we really tend to do that. Why is that? Simply put, because we seem to think as we get older, we get smarter, and that because of that we can explain things in a much more intelligent, verbose manner. But the truth is I learn more from my kids everyday when I tell them to do something and they question me as to why they have to do it.
These little tiny ninjas are almost Watts-like in their philosophical thinking about not wanting to do HW or be on electronics all day without being told no. We tend to get broken down to the point where our only explanation is: I’m older than you therefore you have to listen to me; I’m big, you’re little; I’m smart, you’re dumb; I know more than you do, I’ve lived longer, etc. When the reality is maybe about half of those are actually true.
See kids are the smart ones, they keep it simple. As we get older, we flower things up for various reasons; to impress people of the opposite sex, impress our elders, show our worth or value, justify the time we spent in school learning about things we didn’t care for and probably will never use in actual practice of our lives, but we forge on nonetheless.
Maybe I’m wrong about all of this, but that’s the point, right? To learn we must admit we do not know something. By keeping my eyes closed, my mouth shut and my ears and heart open, I’m hoping to learn something about getting better at this crazy thing called life.
I think this is it as I don’t have the concentration to keep going but more so because I have to get back to the actual paid writing I have to do. It’s been fun guys and I hope that some of you give this a shot too and see what happens.
It seems the one thing I can be thankful for was the typing teachers I had in Catholic school that made us put shoe boxes over our keyboards while in class to be better equipped to do this and of course, tear shit up in Oregon Trails — which if we’re honest, is the real answer to life, right?
This article was originally posted on Medium.